by Rachel Howells

Created on: December 13, 2008

It can be very difficult to understand and identify with how a person with a social phobia feels without also having to deal with this type of fear for oneself. Fortunately, I am intimately familiar with the internal workings of a social phobic and can offer a small glimpse, a snapshot if you will, of what goes on inside a social phobic when she finds herself in hostile, alien social territory or at least what she perceives to be hostile, alien social territory.

A true social phobic knows that the paralyzing fear experienced when dealing with strangers or people he or she doesn't known very well when in social situations is much more than a subjective feeling open to interpretation. There is an actual physiological response, including a rapidly increasing heart rate, sweating, shaking, stuttering and racing thoughts that go hand-in-hand with the disordered thought processes a social phobic experiences when in a social setting.

What is particularly distressing for a social phobic is the obsessive thought that people will judge her in an unfavorable light. The social phobic becomes so immobilized with fear that others will think she is stupid, weird or uninteresting that she remains silent when in social gatherings and prays that nobody will notice her at all. What is even worse than this, for the social phobic, is the belief that others will detect her fear and ridicule her for it.

To other people the social phobic ends up coming across as awkward and uncomfortable or else aloof and unfriendly, which in turn justifies and reinforces the social phobic's fear, and herein lays the problem. The social phobic is so terrified that she will come across as awkward and uncomfortable that she in effect does come across as awkward and uncomfortable, which helps to keep this type of anxiety disorder alive and well.

Social phobia is an irrational, debilitating fear that in a very real sense negatively impacts the quality of a social phobic's life. As a social phobic, I understand that my fear is irrational, yet there it is, choking me every single day of my life for as long as I can remember.

For a social phobic, the most utilized coping mechanisms are avoidance, silence and self-isolation. For people like me, though, who might be considered "functional" social phobics, avoidance, silence and isolation aren't always possible. I say "functional" because I have managed to maintain at least the bare essentials of sociability necessary to function within a society, but just barely.

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